April 2011 Issue

The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll

Americans dismiss the idea of a new national holiday. They also thumb their noses at a trip to a tourist-friendly Cuba. (And about that new version of Huck Finn? Hands off, please.)

Click here](/magazine/2011/04/60-minutes-poll-201104.html?currentPage=2) to view the complete results, or to answer the questions yourself, visit the 60 Minutes homepage at CBSNews.com.

No changes, please! We Americans are experiencing another of our periodic retrenchments, or so this month’s poll suggests. Several proposed new laws were floated to respondents, to no evident enthusiasm: the notions of making public breast-feeding, cigar smoking, child spanking, and cursing illegal each received an unequivocal thumbs-down. Given a range of choices for an optimum retirement age, we slouched toward the familiar 60 to 65. We didn’t think much of the recently altered edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with the n-word replaced by “slave” more than two-thirds of us said changing Twain’s book was a “bad idea.” (Only 24 percent of African-Americans thought it a good idea.) And while a few of us might have deemed the newly relaxed restrictions on travel to Cuba a cause for celebration—that food! that music! el béisbol! vintage cars with fins!—by and large the public claims virtually no interest in visiting Castro’s threadbare Utopia. So, no change in our plans (or absence of plans). Finally, even the notion of a brand-new holiday, tantalizingly dangled before us, barely got us to arise from the Barcalounger and wearily wave the idea away: Sure, fine, maybe Election Day, 37 percent of us said—nice to have a holiday on a day most of us don’t vote anyway. And our enthusiasm dwindled from there. (But we bet that if a holiday were suddenly decreed for tomorrow, as a total surprise, we’d all like the idea just fine.) In short, until something changes, we’re not changing a thing.